The Lost Girls of Devon

by Barbara O'Neal

  “It’s terrible, no matter who it is,” she said, and she sounded so very weary. “Zoe, if you have any questions, you can text or have Isa call me on your behalf. We do not have to speak again.”

  She hung up.

  A brick of guilt fell into my gut. I stared at the phone for a long moment, burning with shame and fury and a little shattering thing at the back of it all that made me feel breathless, as if shrapnel had lodged in my lungs. I pressed a hand to my diaphragm, reminding myself that it was just an emotion. Nothing I hadn’t felt a thousand times before.

  “That was a bit unsporting.”

  I looked at him. Flushed. “Probably.”

  He licked his bottom lip and picked up the phone. “No one is perfect, I suppose.”

  His meaning was clear—that I expected her to be perfect when I was mean myself. With a swift and bitter fury, I said, “The sainted Sage knows everything.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. You never understood. You thought it was the same, you losing her. Diana losing her. It wasn’t.”

  I thought it would make him angry, but instead, he bowed his head. “You’re right, Zoe.”

  “Let’s go see if we can figure anything out with all the material from Diana before Gran wakes up,” I said. “I’ll need to focus on her then.”

  We walked back to the kitchen through the dark, cold rooms, some of which I couldn’t remember ever using. The hearth, as tall as my shoulder, stood cold and empty before a long wooden table that in my lifetime had never seen big family gatherings or parties of any kind. “What’s the point of these houses in the modern era?” I wondered aloud.

  “History?”

  “Cold comfort, isn’t it?” I paused, looking at the view of the garden in the half-purple twilight. A white rose blazed against the dusk. I wondered where Isabel was. She’d been out a long time. I pulled the phone out of my pocket to text her. “Maybe the manor should be flats.”

  “Would you really want to do that?”

  “I don’t know.” That sense of desperate sadness clawed at me again, a sense of time passing, of nothing having any permanence or reliability. I blinked back tears. “I’m just in a mood. Let’s have some tea and see if we can figure out what Diana might have discovered.”

  He touched my upper back for one moment, then dropped his hand as I moved away, into the light of the kitchen, where the Rayburn warmed the air and a kettle waited. As I walked, a text from Isabel came in.

  Every hour on the hour, and I’m fine. I’ll be home in a bit.

  Sooner rather than later. It’s getting dark

  k

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Poppy

  After Zoe’s call, I stood with the phone in my hand for fully five minutes, feeling a thousand memories move through my body, my heart. Zoe as a baby, and Ben playing with a goat, and Sage and Zoe heading out to explore, shoulder to shoulder.

  Her voice now was mature and cold, so different from the girl who’d informed me that she would never speak to me again unless I came home to her. Had I believed she would stick to it?

  Not at all.

  What surprised me was how deep my longing for her went. I wanted to look at her face, watch expressions move over it. I wanted to trace the path of time across her brow and chin, and listen to her spin stories about her life, about Sage and art and her husband and Isabel’s birth. I wanted to listen to the sound of her voice, both American and English, and make special meals to make her smile.

  I deeply, painfully wanted to know her, and it appeared that perhaps that would never happen. It was the price I would have to pay for leaving her.

  Abandoning her.

  Scarring her.

  I closed my eyes and let the pain and shame fill me for the space of three breaths. Yearning. Sorrow. Pain. Whatever she doled out now, I had certainly earned.

  With a heavy heart, I headed to the village and the constabulary. It was a rush of motion and discussion, everyone busy after the discovery of the body, but I knew who I wanted to talk to. Although the front line tried to hold me off, Inspector Hannaford heard me and came forward to wave me into his office.

  “What can I help you with, Poppy?” he asked. We’d attended school together until my mother had sent me off to boarding school, though he’d been a year or two behind me.

  “Was it Jennie on the beach?”

  “Poppy, you know it’s too early.”

  “No, you have an idea right now.”

  “Did you know the girl?” he asked, slightly askance.

  “She came to me every week for a reading.” Her palm had broken my heart the first time I saw it, the shortest life line I’d ever seen, and yet I’d tried to jolly her into action. Ways to save her life.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “So tell me, was it her?”

  He sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We honestly don’t know yet. The body was pretty badly decomposed.”

  “How long was it in the water?”

  “Hard to say. A couple of weeks, probably.”

  A little of the pressure on my heart eased. “I saw Jennie last Tuesday. Almost a week.”

  “Right.” His attitude was guarded. “I promise I’ll let you know as soon as we identify her.”

  I slumped, my shoulders suddenly tired of carrying the weight of sorrow. “What is going on in this village, George?”

  “Wish I knew.” He picked up a pencil and made it do pirouettes over a sheet of paper. “Your mother thinks it might be smuggling.”

  “Is anyone monitoring the coast for that kind of activity?”

  “Of course they are.” He sighed. “We haven’t found anything. If you know a spell to draw out the bad guys, I’d love to see you offer it.”

  I smiled sadly as I stood and smoothed my tunic. My bracelets clattered down my arm. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Me gran was a witch, you know. She had a cure for everything. Lived to be ninety-nine, she did.”

  “Is that right?” I paused. “Was she local? What was her name?”

  “Lived down by the river, with a smallholding. Mary Hooper.”

  “Oh, aye. She came from a long line of wise women. Well known for her cures, your grandmother. They say she held a line against smallpox in the thirties, and not a soul in the village fell ill.”

  His cheeks shone red with pleasure. “I’ve never heard that before. Thank you.”

  “Maybe you’ve a touch of her gifts,” I said, cocking my head. He did have that look about him, now that I took the time to pay attention. Great pale-blue eyes and a thick head of hair that grew almost unnaturally well for a man well into his fifties. I let myself go still, studying him, and reached out for his aura, testing—

  But he shut me right down, walls as thick and opaque as gold bars. I wondered if he knew he’d done it. “Come see me, George,” I said. “I’ll make you a pot of tea.”

  “Good night, Ms. Fairchild,” he said, erecting more distance between us. “I’ll let you know when we learn the identity of the body.”

  Out in the night, I lingered. Where was Jennie? Where was her baby?

  Suddenly I realized that I was more worried over a village girl than I’d ever been over my own daughter when she was making her way through all the challenges of growing up. Around the world, I had collected lost and lonely girls, offering them insight and a place to sit and tell their stories, opening my heart to them in ways—

  Oh, Zoe, what have I done?

  And how could I never have put the two things together? The fact that I’d filled the emptiness of being away from my daughter with girls other people had abandoned. What terrible twistedness was that?

  Why hadn’t I come home to her after Ravi died?

  I couldn’t remember. The years following his death were a blur of temples and ashrams and wanderings. I felt I’d been shattered and all the pieces of myself had to be reassembled, one shard and then another. It
had taken a long time.

  The sound of her voice on the phone this afternoon echoed in my mind as I made my way slowly up the high street. In the restaurants, people laughed and made merry. Through the windows of the Golden Mermaid, I spied a pair of local couples, well to do and polished, eating oysters and drinking martinis.

  Once, I had dreamed of a family of my own. A husband to tease me indulgently and children to be exasperated with me. A long table I would set with cloth napkins in rings everyone would choose to be their own.

  I’d longed for that as a child, too, but we never sat down at the same time to dinner. At the time we kept staff—not a lot, but a cook/housekeeper and a gardener and a nanny until I was ten. Maisy, our cook, fed me at the same kitchen table where my mother now took her meals, me on my own while my mother stormed around or fought with my father, or drank martinis alone, listening to Frank Sinatra records.

  My father died when I was thirteen, and after that I didn’t go home from school much at all, except at Christmas. Other holidays, I found a way to be with friends who traveled to Zurich for the holidays, or to their homes in the South of France. My best girlfriend’s father ran a slew of international shoe-manufacturing centers, and I traipsed around a bit with her over summers, to the Black Sea and Amsterdam and once, thrillingly, to Thailand. I’d been madly in love with Yul Brenner in The King and I, and I’d hoped to see his counterpart somewhere in the villages of the old Siam.

  I realized I’d been staring into the restaurant window for far too long and made myself move.

  By the time I’d finished school, I knew I was absolutely not going to go off to university for any reason. My mother threw a fit, of course—how else would I find a husband of good standing?—but I refused. It was the seventies, and I wanted a life of beauty and choice, not like my mother’s staid existence, she in her pressed trousers and discreet strings of pearls, so I followed the hippie train to Glastonbury and donned my india cotton skirts and long earrings and grew my hair to my waist and smoked weed and ate mushrooms.

  Meeting Ben had steered my cart for a time. Girls of my generation were so enculturated to expect that, to be good helpmeets to the men who thought they’d chosen us.

  I loved him. I genuinely did. He was kind and quietly brilliant, and his abstract sculptures wrecked me—they were the air, the desert, the morning sun, all without direct reference. We were sexually very good together, which I thought meant we were soul mates and learned later was just good chemistry, but it made a beautiful daughter.

  Who hated me, with good reason. I heard it in her voice tonight, the struggle she’d had to keep her tone from breaking. As she spoke in a voice so unlike the one she’d had as a child, this one as musically toned as her father’s, it occurred to me that I did not know her at all. I’d heard about her life from my mother, and I’d stalked her online as I was able, though, unlike most of her age group, she wasn’t really very present on social media.

  But I did not know my own daughter, because I’d chosen someone else.

  On the eighteenth day of my sojourn across Rajasthan, on what was meant to be a monthlong trip with my girlfriend, then back home to England, I met Ravi. My friend and I had landed in Udaipur, a busy city with an old town and a lake with a hotel in the middle of it. We had no money and all our belongings were on our backs, but I ached to see that hotel. We polished ourselves up as well as we were able, dressed in the prettiest of the outfits we’d splurged on at the markets, and took a boat ride over. Young pretty women always got dispensation, and today was no exception.

  It was so lovely. From the hotel you could see a great white palace that spread across one edge of the lake in splendor. Windows looked out over the mountains behind us, and the water and the hotel, and I was enchanted.

  I’d lost Annie, my friend, and was wandering the hotel trying to find her when I saw Ravi. He stood in an arched doorway near the edge of the island, with the mountains rising behind him. The sun hung low, spreading a deep-orange light across the stones and the building and casting him in a compelling light. He wore a tunic and trousers and had sandals on his tanned feet. He was not, as Ben was, a beautiful creature. His face was harsh, his nose too large, but he had large dark eyes, and they looked right at me, steadily, plainly.

  I would like to say that I felt the world shift, but I didn’t. I looked away and primly kept walking. We’d been warned not to give the wrong messages to men here, and I took that seriously.

  But he fell in beside me. “Do you speak English?” he asked in an exquisite, well-educated accent.

  “I do.” Up close, he smelled of spice and morning, and his nose was a marvel. I suddenly thought I must have met him before, even if I didn’t remember, because his face and voice were as familiar to me as my own hands. “Where have we met?”

  “I would have remembered,” he said, and paused, making me stop too. “Perhaps it was another incarnation.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed.

  We fell in love. It was instant and deep. Not lust, for we did not think we would be lovers. He was a married man, a writer and scholar who’d come to Udaipur to pen stories of the great Mughals. Adventure stories, full of swords and drama and beautiful women sacrificed to honor. At first, my task was to facilitate communications with his English publishers: the same, by the way, who’d published my mother’s mysteries.

  Right away we made each other laugh, and we could fall into discussions of literature and folktales that would last for hours. I read to him from a book of English folktales and sang some of the old ballads to him. He sang the folk songs of his world, translating their stories for me and nearly always making me cry.

  From the very start, the connection was deep and inexplicable. From the first conversation we were not strangers, and the weaving of our minds commenced instantly and never ceased. Years later, I still found ribbons of Ravi’s thoughts woven through my own.

  We spent nearly every waking hour together, and then one day he returned from his wife and children and brought me inside to his rooms and kissed me. It was a kiss so transforming, so completely other, that I realized I had only been a caterpillar all this time, and his lips cracked open my cocoon so I could emerge as a butterfly. It was as if I’d been called to India for just this moment. For Ravi and our connection, which remained to this day as inexplicable as anything that had ever happened to me.

  We made love as if we had invented it, lingering over each other’s bodies for so long sometimes that we would be faint with hunger and would have to stagger out to find sustenance.

  As I walked the ordinary streets of Axestowe, I let the memories of Ravi flood back into my body. His long limbs, his big hands moving over my body. His mouth. How I sank into it.

  And more. It was as if we shared one mind, one soul, and only upon finding each other were we whole.

  He loved me. I loved him. It was terrible to say so, but I forgot everything else.

  We were together for nine years, half of eighteen, a sacred Vedic number. In those years, we lived together in Udaipur, and he traveled home to his small town every few weeks to spend time with his wife and his children. His wife knew about me, and it sometimes made me ache with guilt, but I could no more have left him than cut off my own foot.

  Summers, we traveled north to Kashmir, to live on a shabby houseboat on Dal Lake. Winds blew down from the Himalayas and across the water to cool our bodies but never our ardor.

  It was an enchanted time.

  And yet I’d left my daughter to do it. I took no pride in that, nor in the fact that Ravi had a wife and children who missed him when he was with me.

  But life is not an orderly thing, and rules of conduct do not always tell us how to proceed. I could not turn from Ravi. Our connection, the vast love that had bloomed between us, was the reason I’d been called to India. It was precious, and holy, even if that word seemed wrong.

  I spoke to Zoe every week by phone, although it was horrifically expensive in those days before cell phones,
so we wrote letters. Long, chatty letters, and hers had drawings of all sorts, postcards she painted or drew herself, big murals of the countryside that she rolled up and mailed in cardboard tubes. I kept them, all of them. Even now, I had every last one of them.

  I had learned, over time, to tell the truth, even when it was painful. The truth of this was that I knew my daughter missed me desperately, and I missed her, too, but I’d chosen Ravi over her, just as he’d chosen me over his children.

  I never once considered returning to England, and my mother refused to let Zoe come to India. She thought it was dangerous and horrifying, especially when I had malaria and could not speak for weeks.

  My love affair with Ravi was doomed to be short lived. It happened slowly at first. He was easily tired and did not make the trip to his town so often. As the months passed, we learned that he could not be cured. It seemed impossible that I would lose him, impossible that the vigorous man he was could ever die.

  I nursed him in an apartment open to the breezes off the lake in Udaipur. We read aloud from the great classics of both India and England, Shakespeare and the bhakti poems of Mira Bai, and the Ramayana. He loved the earthy poetry of the cavalier poets. I read him mysteries and war stories and whatever else he wished. I read so much aloud that my voice changed.

  As his big frame melted away to almost nothing, I fed him broth and teas brought by a local healer. I bathed him and sang folk songs from my childhood.

  And back home, Zoe was becoming a teenager, with righteous anger shifting her sorrow into power. She refused to speak to me, and returned my letters unopened.

  It shook me. I still could not go home. Not while he was dying.

  Which he did. Much too fast. The last thing he said to me was, “You are my heart and soul and greatest love.” He held my hand as he drew his last breath.

  It had been twenty-three years since that day, but the memory of it could still bring me to my knees.

  After that, I dressed in white, the color of widows. I could not think or breathe for my pain. For two years I lived in an ashram near Kolkata, taking refuge in the daily prayers and chores. There was no requirement to be anything but who I was, a woman shattered by grief. By then, Zoe would never talk to me, and I had no energy to make my way back to her.